Angular Diversity Aperture (ADA) Receivers for Indoor Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) Visible Light Communications (VLC)

The angular diversity aperture (ADA) receiver is a new form of optical wireless receiver which is made up of a number of receiving elements (REs) each consisting of a photodiode (PD) located below an aperture in an opaque screen. Previous work on the use of ADA receivers for visible light communication (VLC) analyzes only REs with round apertures and photodiodes with a limited range of parameters. This paper extends the analysis to calculate the channel gains for REs with for both round and square apertures and PDs and for more parameters. Graphs show how the gain varies as a function of the relative orientation of the transmitter and receiver for ten different designs. It is shown that the directionality of an RE depends on the offset of the PD from the aperture and that the field of view depends on the distance between the aperture and the PD. Detailed theoretical analysis and extensive simulation results demonstrate the bit error rate (BER) performance of receivers based on these ten designs in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) VLC application. The round and square designs are found to have very similar BERs. It is shown that, even with high levels of shot noise, good BER results can be achieved throughout a typical scenario.